The Unexpected Joys of Working in France

An American perfectionist learns to do a little less.

I’ve always been scrappy, and until recently have always had to work outside of “normal” business hours.

As a former New York City restaurant manager, and then an event-planner, and then an entrepreneur with an online platform, let’s just say I’ve had my share of weekend and late-evening labor. And until my move to France, I didn’t really notice what it was doing to me or what I was missing.

And now, a word from our clarification department. The goal of this missive is not to suggest that no one in France works hard, because that is simply not true. Nor is my objective to attack over-achieving Americans. I’m one of them!

What I’m talking about is a fundamental belief and philosophy in French society that, you know what? We all need and deserve our time off. It’s a priority in life.

My husband (we call him Monsieur B) enjoys nine weeks of paid vacation each year. NINE. He works for a big international automotive company. I’ll wait while you recover.

To me, what’s even more appealing than the concept of nine weeks of vacation, is that everyone on my husband’s team actually supports those who are away from work, who then support them in turn. There are no hard feelings toward co-workers who do take their time off, and there’s a real reverence for the rule of not bothering anyone who’s on holiday. Because that’s their chance to disconnect, to enjoy, to be with family, to recharge and restore. That time is highly valued and respected.

Full disclosure: over the last two decades, I’ve owned my own businesses and so have always theoretically had the authority to grant myself whatever time off I wanted. But that’s not what I did. Even when I was traveling or “on vacation,” I kept right on working nearly every day and, like a lot of my peers, I even humble-bragged about pulling a late-night proposal-writing session or lamented that I had to skip my nephew’s baseball game for a weekend client meeting. I was busy, therefore I was.

Before my move to France, the very idea of taking even two full weeks away from work always seemed to me to be the height of decadence, pure hedonism.

Sure, in my “before” life, I may have resented an event vendor calling me in the evening to ask about a contract, or rolled my eyes at a bride dialing me on my vacation to discuss the urgent matter of her rehearsal dinner invitation envelope size (did I find it ever so slightly too large?). These things may have irritated me, but I didn’t think them abnormal at all. They came with the “demands” of work.

What I found out, and what has been transformational in my own life, is that the French don’t completely associate their identity with their work. Free time is just as important. There is a sense of common pride and understanding, even encouragement when it comes to time off.

Something I’ve noticed is that whereas in the States we might make small talk about the weather, here in France you’ll often hear people asking each other when or where they’re going on holiday. Partez-vous en vacances ?

At first, it almost startled me that after Monsieur B came home from work every day, he was just fully present and available for activities, walking, cooking, talking. He rarely ever gets a work call or email outside of business hours, and that’s part of his company’s policy. There are rules around it too, but parsing them or their politics isn’t what I’m about.

I’m just here for the fact that having stumbled upon a real and sustainable work-life mix, the experience is slowly remaking me as a human and shifting my whole way of being and being productive.

When my husband suggested a weeklong roadtrip to visit family in Germany with a stop in Alsace, I panicked a little inside. When would I do my calls? But I decided to let go a little, and you know what? Nothing bad happened, and everything good happened.

Back in New York, when someone would tell me they were going on vacation for a week, I remember some judgmental thoughts running through my mind. They related to my belief that I was indispensable to my own work, and therefore couldn’t be “away” like that. Taking “all that time” just wasn’t possible for those of us who were aiming to do big things.

On weekends during my first year in France, I’d feel like I was playing hooky if I wasn’t accomplishing something. Sometimes that guilty pleasure was fun, like I was getting away with it, but the self-reproach that followed often overshadowed the pleasure.

Now I’ve learned—or let’s just say I’m trying—to embrace la période de repose. And it is a beautiful if challenging lesson.

In fact, “free time” that is truly free from work is one of the greatest gifts I’ve discovered in this enormous new adventure I’m living.

I realize that it’s not so easy in the US. It’s not in our culture to fully disconnect from work, although there is more talk now about the benefits of doing so. Most of my friends check their email—and respond—every day, even on vacation.

The day before I moved to France, while I was packing up my life, one of my former colleagues tried to time-zone shame me on a very stressful call. She said that everyone on my small team was “terrified” that once I was in Europe, I’d no longer be available when they needed me.

Now I laugh at the small-minded silliness of her remarks (in our global society, everyone works from everywhere), but that same guilty thought had stressed me out so much that I’d already brought it up with my cohort at Chief (the fabulous women’s business organization) and with my therapist. Spoiler alert: both helped me to embrace the truth: that I was in fact entitled to decide to move to France for love, and that work hours could easily be figured out.

This year, for the first time in my life, I went sailing in glorious Friesland with a group of my husband’s friends, and I didn’t even bring my laptop. For me, that was a milestone. As a writer, I don’t think I’d been separated from my computer for more than six hours in the last ten years. OK, it was only four days, and I confess I mainly left it at home because I feared it would fall overboard, but still. Progress!

Listen, I’m not lauding my sublime French work-life #winning over that of anyone else. I’m new over here, and I’m just trying things, deciding which of my work practices I might want to update as I navigate this new chapter.

One thing I’ve already noticed, for example, is that simply shifting how you view your time off and your relationship to it—whether that’s early morning, lunch hour, evenings, weekends or on a full-fledged vacation—just slightly altering how you honor your own free moments or days can bring gifts of greater contentment and even productivity.

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Notes I wrote to myself:

• Maybe don’t check your email in the morning until you’re on your way to work or at your desk, or at least until you’ve had a little breakfast and a stretch?

• If you have to check emails at night, could you possibly read them just once, and respond outside of work hours only if it’s truly urgent?

• How about if you let your clients in the States know a range of hours that you can take calls so that your time outside of that is yours to manage?

• When you do stop working or sign out of email, you might also want to experiment with not immediately clicking on the Instagram icon. Just saying.

• What if you didn’t take your computer on vacation this summer to Provence?

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That last one, though. Oh la la !

Très belle journée,

Karen